Some Better Place

Earlier this week, Gevlon took it upon himself to analyse the outcome of this year's Blaugust as he saw it. He posted twice, first to assess the "long term effect" and then to see what blogs he could add to his blogroll as a result.

This caused a small ripple in the blogosphere, with Izlain, Rambling Redshirt and UltrViolet posting in response and a number of other Blaugustians leaving comments. Some seemed to take the Goblin's analysis to heart while others questioned both its methodology and accuracy.

I just thought he'd mistaken the basic purpose of Blaugust, which is a festival celebrating blogging and a bit of a talking-shop and meeting place for current bloggers. There was some justification for the confusion, since it's true that this year's event did also incorporate the New Blogger Initiative, which is intended to increase the blog supply for thirsty readers, something it's managed to do very successfully over the years.

Despite its undeniable success in encouraging new entrants and returnees to the form, the NBI has always had an extremely high drop-out rate. Gevlon's arch-enemy, Wilhelm, has occasionally analyzed the results, albeit over a much longer timeframe than the Goblin's: the number of blogs that survive, let alone thrive, is small.

According to Wilhelm's 2013 post on the fallout from the original NBI in 2012, of a hundred and ten participants, only thirty were still active a year later. Looking at those thirty I see just five that I'm still reading in 2018 - Why I Game, Ravalation (who hasn't posted for a while but was very active until spring 2018), Ald Shot First, Beyond Tannhauser Gate and Casual Aggro.

Five out of more than a hundred doesn't seem all that impressive but clicking through the links, sixteen of those thirty blogs are still online, if dormant. What's more, quite a few were still posting in 2016 or 2017, so they had a good run.

Of the rest, six go to dead links. That makes twenty-seven. The remaining three bloggers are still active but on different blogs.  

Game Delver is C.T.Murphy, currently blogging as "Murf Versus. Warp to Zero moved to Grimmash, although the last post there was in March this year.

That leaves White Charr, a blog that was technically still live in 2018, but only to point readers to a more active blog on Tumblr. That blog turns out to belong to no-one other than Aywren, longtime resident of my own blogroll, where she trades under the name Aywren Sojourner.

Meanwhile, back at this year's roundup over at Gevlon's, Narratess pops up in the comments to point out she, too, has more than one blog. Lots of people do. Well, lots of people might.

It's hard to be sure when bloggers either retain separate identities with the intent of keeping them secret or hive off different aspects of their blogging into silos according to subject matter. It's particularly difficult to keep track of who's still active when people move without leaving a forwarding address.

Gevlon himself dropped his Blogger identity after a crisis of conscience over supporting Google. He moved to WordPress but helpfully left his Blogger blog active with a link, which is what I still use to find him.

I currently have 175 blogs in my blogroll. I was going to cull them but until I hit whatever limit Blogger imposes I can't really see the point.

As is often mentioned, Blogger has the best automated blog linking out there. It reliably and faultlessly floats the most recent post of any and all of those 175 blogs to the top of the list. By leaving them all on there I can guarantee I'll know immediately if any of the dormant ones wake up.

That's a lot better than Feedly can manage, which is why, increasingly, I use my own blog roll rather than Feedly to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere. I have quite a few non-gaming blogs in Feedly, though, which I would be somewhat dubious about adding to the widget on Inventory Full.

It's been noticeable of late that fewer posts are popping up in my Feedly feed. I've been assuming it's because of natural attrition. As a result of Gevlon's investigations and the surrounding commentary, however, I decided this morning to click on a few of the links that hadn't sparked for a while.

I began with a music blog I follow. It's called "Music That I Like" and it's by Everett True, a music journalist and sometime performer, who I first encountered in the mid-1980s, when he was writing and performing under the name The Legend. (Link very NSFW!).

The last post at Music That I Like was just over a year ago, when Everett was raving about the very wonderful Dream Wife. He'd seemed quite depressed around that point and I was wondering if he'd finally packed it all in for good but thankfully it turns out not.

Music That I Like may not have had any new posts since August 2017 but it has a twitter feed that's still going. I clicked on that and it magically transported me to Everett's new blog, How NOT To Write About Music, where the most recent post was...yesterday!

All of which suggests that, if you want to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere, you need to pay attention and make an effort. It would be very nice if people always announced when they're taking a break and always left a change of address post up after they'd moved, but they don't. Sometimes you have to go look for them.

I guess now I should go click through all the blogs on my blogroll and Feedly that haven't posted in a few months or years to see if they went on to another party somewhere and forgot to tell me. It'd be quite a big project, though.

I've got a week off work in November. Maybe I'll do it then.

Then We Came To The End

It's been a trip but I can't say I'm sorry it's over. Turns out there's a very good reason I don't normally post on work days. It makes me slightly stressed, it mildly irritates Mrs Bhagpuss and sometimes I just don't have much to say.

Okay, that's not true. I always have something to say. I had plenty to say last night, when all I ended posting was screenshots. I just didn't have time to say it.

Now that the summer's over and Blaugust with it, several people have chosen to cast a glance at what's behind us. SDWeasel, Gracie, Aywren, Marathal, Mailvaltar, Shadowz, Nogamara, Eldarieal, Wilhelm, Sandrian, Endalia and probably many  more I've missed. Of all the wrap parties, perhaps the most intense was thrown by Endgame Viable, where UltrViolet, all of whose Blaugust posts I have very much enjoyed, chose to engage in a vigorous session of self-criticism worthy of the Cultural Revolution at its most unforgiving. I can only admire his rigor.

I would never be so harsh on myself. One of my fatal flaws is the innate self-confidence born of being an only child who grew up in a stable and loving environment. I do tend to feel pleased with myself a lot of the time even when there's little objective justification for it.

Looking back at my Blaugust output, I find that I managed to hit my target of posting every day. I even threw in a bonus post somewhere because when I post this wrap-up I'll be sitting pretty on thirty-two posts for the month. I said "post" too often then, didn't I?

Over the month, I ranged widely across the usual topics, repeating myself and trying to justify doing so by drawing attention to it. I guess I'm still a postmodernist at heart. (That sentence would run so much better as "I guess I'm still a postmodern girl at heart" but even in 2018 I don't think I'm going to go there...)

I was planning on subbing World of Warcraft for August just so I coud get some Battle for Azeroth posts out of it (without actually buying BfA, of course) but in the end I couldn't justify it because I had too much else going on. I would never have logged in. I very much enjoyed reading everyone else's experiences of the new expansion, which sounds pretty good to me. They varied so wildly it often sounded as though people weren't playing the same MMO let alone the same content.

Instead I bought Bless Online, which gave me a good run of posts mid-month. I'll be going back for more, most likely, although the biggest effect Bless has had on me is to remind me how much better Twin Saga and Dragon Nest were - and Black Desert, for that matter - so I may return to one or more of those instead.

Most of my Blaugust posts were lengthy. There's not too much filler in there. I did notice my fact-checking was slipping a little in the latter half of the month but mostly I still managed to do the requisite due dilligence before making any statements or claims I couldn't readily wriggle out of.

I'm pleased with that but I had, as always, hoped Blaugust would encourage me to write shorter, pithier pieces. As usual, I was disappointed. It's particularly annoying because I'm very well aware that shorter posts get a stronger response and I know that I sometimes weaken my own arguments by burying the main thrust of the post under the weight of all the connections I make while writing it.

In a way, the problem is that my posts aren't long enough. Some of them really need to be 5,000 word essays, not blog posts at all. And then there's the polish - or lack of it.

Back when I used to write reviews and articles for fanzines I would sometimes spend an entire week or more working on a single article of maybe fifteen hundred words. These days I often knock something like that out in a couple of hours. I don't know whether that's progress or not.

Whatever it is, it seems to be what I do and Blaugust has taught me, yet again, that I'm likely to keep doing it whether I want to or not. I'm verbose and I'll just have to live with it.

The best thing about this Blaugust hasn't been anything I did, though. It's been what everyone else was doing. Going in, I was really feeling the lack of good, new blogs. My Feedly was thin. Blaugust fixed that.

That's partly because Blaugust this year also incorporated the Newbie Blogger Initiative. The NBI always kicks up some great new writers but this year it outdid itself. There genuinely were more posts than I had time to read even though I did try. That's a happy problem to have.

Naming names is invidious and I'll leave it to Belghast to hand out the awards but I would just like to say that, of the bloggers I had never read before, I did particularly look forward to posts from Mailvaltar, Unidentified Signal Source, Moonshine Mansion, The MMOist and MMOsey.

Those are by no means all the new blogs and bloggers I really enjoyed reading, either. It was a vintage year all round. I very much hope you'll all keep posting after Blaugust ends even if right now you've fallen in a heap, mopping your brow with eau de cologne and croaking "Never again!"

Indeed, I hope everyone who gave it a crack carries on, at their own pace and in their own time, whether what they write is to my taste or not. Blogging isn't dead yet and it's not likely to be, not with this crew at the controls.

Congratulations to everyone who made it to the end - let's do it all over again...next year!

My Emptiness

It's the penultimate day of Blaugust and I am the most pushed for time I've been in the whole thirty days so far. Ironically, the moment the event ends I have four straight days of freedom so I will most likely carry on daily posting, making it five full weeks since I skipped a day.

Tonight, though, I got nothing! So have some pretty pictures.

Injury to eye motif. Dr Wertham should hear about this.

I'm even happier I made the effort to get this kite now we have Novelty Slots.

Why are we hiding in the jumping puzzle? Who cares? It's so blue!

Apparently you can tame and ride dragons in Bless - providing you don't mind looking like The Tick.

In Twin Saga you can ride a guinea pig. Is that cooler than a dragon?

Okay. I really need to play Twin Saga again.

I mean, my friends must miss me, don't they?

You got that right!

Now We Are Six : GW2

Guild Wars 2 is currently celebrating its sixth anniversary. Until yesterday, the festivities had been a tad understated. It's hardly surprising. Six years isn't much of a milestone.

We got a sixth anniversary pack in the mail on the anniversary of launch day. It was nice but not too exciting, since it was pretty much last year's over again. It did come with the choice of a set of armor skins, all of which can be seen over at Dulfy's. Nice armor, too, for a change.

Then there were the usual sales in Evon Gnashblade's Black Lion Emporium (aka cash shop). Sales are always welcome. I picked up a bunch of bag slot expanders at a decent discount.

Other than that I wasn't paying too much attention. Then I came home from work last night and Mrs Bhagpuss said "Look in the Gem Store when you get on - we've got presents!". And we did. Two of them.

One was the traditional Customer Appreciation Package - a free Black Lion Key and a Black Lion Chest to open with it. As I've said before I love lootboxes. I'm a huge fan of RNG and I'd always rather have a box with randomized contents to open than one with either a choice I can make or a specific item.

I don't, however, like paying for lootboxes because I'm a cheapskate. Free ones are for me.

As I've also said before, GW2 has some of the crappiest lootboxes in existence. I opened my free one on each of my three eligible accounts and the best thing I got was a dye I already had. Pathetic. Indeed, most of the items I got were so bad they verged on the insulting. If I had paid money I'd be furious.

Part of the problem from my perspective is that because of the backlash against lootbox randomization, GW2's boxes now automatically include a fragment of currency, which you save up to buy stuff. This, apparently, is a popular change and has caused the cost of the lootboxes (which have to be found as drops in the game and are tradeable) to skyrocket. Go figure.

That takes up one of the random slots and this time round we also got a guaranteed mini - a bunny (actually a "Springer" but no-one but ANet calls them that).  That left just two random rolls. Mine came up snake eyes. Three times.

Much better - and contradicting what I just said about not liking boxes with choices - we also got a Novelty Selection Box. This ties in with something I had no idea was going to happen - the addition of a Novelties Section to the Wardrobe.

It's explained in detail in this post on the GW2 website. There are four slots, one each for Musical Instruments, Held Items, Toys and Chairs. This means that, when you buy or otherwise obtain any of these things, you can add them to your Wardrobe and every character on your account can use them. You even get a new hotbar slot just for Novelties.

That. Is. HUGE!

I've spent very little money on GW2 in six years other than buying the expansions. There's very rarely anything in the Gem Shop that interests me.

I absolutely cannot fathom why people spend money (or gold) on perma-use utilities like unlimited salvage devices or the endless procession of novelty picks, axes and billhooks. I have always found the ones vendors sell to be perfectly adequate but judging by the insane racket and firework display going on around me every time I visit a node I am clearly in a tiny minority.

What I do sometimes spend money on, however, and have done throughout the life of the game, is Toys. I have Sonic Diggers, Electromagnetic Ascenders, Kites, Balloons... I love my Magic Carpet and Riding Broom so much I wrote posts about both of them.

Until now I had either to buy separate Toys for each character that wanted to use them or I had to put them in my shared inventory slots. And since I'm also too mean to buy more shared inventory slots...

Now everyone gets to use them! Okay, I still have to buy multiples because I have three accounts, but it absolutely will encourage me to do that. Also, chairs. Chairs! I've seen someone sitting in the Emblazoned Dragon Throne and it's awesome!

There aren't any pictures of me using the new Novelties I got from the Selection Box because... I haven't selected any yet. This is why I prefer randomized luckboxes to being given a choice. I suffer from Choice Paralysis.

I suffer from it so badly that I almost all of the choiceboxes I have ever had in GW2 are still stashed in my bank. Yes, all six years' of them. I often take them out and open them to look at the options only to close them and put them back. One day I'm going to do a post where I list them all. It can be used in my committal hearing, when they put me in a secure facility for my own safety.

And, while we're on the subject of hoarding, there's a sale on Bank Tab Expanders on Friday 31st. I already have my gems ready.

The Novelty Selection Box and Customer Appreciation Package are available for free from the Gem Store for two weeks. All accounts except F2P are eligible. Don't miss out. The choice of Novelties is excellent and you have tohave better luck with the Black Lion chests than I did...

The Way We Play Now

A couple of Blaugustians have been riffing on the ever-popular topic of soloing in MMOs. It's a question that's as old as the genre itself. I very clearly remember it being a hot-button issue even when I started playing EverQuest almost twenty years ago and I'm willing to believe it goes back longer than that.

It's also not a subject that's amenable to rational discussion. Views tend to polarize harshly. On the one hand you have the "it says Multiple right there on the box" crowd, who believe the entire meaning and purpose of the genre is collaborative and social and anything else is a betrayal of trust. On the other there's the "my time, my dime" crew, who feel it's their right to play the game any damn way they please.

Inbetween comes a vast mass of hybrid opinions, all truly held and passionately expressed. And everyone wants validation for the way they play, even if they don't think the way other people play is valid at all.

Fine, so far as it goes, I guess. It's always good to have something reliable to argue about. But then I got to wondering... is there really any meaning  left in the terms solo and group anyway? Haven't we moved into new modes altogether now?

Oh, of course I understand you can still group and raid and so on. The games support it and there are contexts in which it's even necessary. Communication and organization still matter. No-one's saying the gameplay differences no longer exist at all. But was the gameplay ever what people were really arguing about?

The split between solo and group players (and then again between everyone else and raiders) was always a matter of policy, not of practice. The issue wasn't whether you could solo but whether you should.

Committed groupers always felt there was something suspicious about soloists: something louche, untrustworthy, not quite proper. Meanwhile, dedicated soloists regarded group players as a herd: helpless alone, lost without their self-appointed leaders, a state of being to be pitied, not envied.

Fragmented hints of those sentiments still surface occasionally but such a sense of elitism is much harder to maintain when the structures of the games themselves so self-evidently deny it. It's difficult to pin down exactly when things began to change, but change they most certainly have.

Vanilla WoW, now often cited as a golden age of mutual reliance and group-friendly gaming, was seen by many at the time as the not-so-thin end of the wedge where solo content was concerned. Compared to what went before it was solo-friendly in the extreme.

As Blizzard doubled down on solo play then doubled down again, introducing automated group-making and Looking For Raid, Warhammer brought in the concept of the Public Quest. You didn't need an invite any more to play with the people around you.

Rift took that idea and spun an entire game out of it. Finally, Guild Wars 2 did away with almost every concept of group play to create a world in which all content was shared content and everyone was de facto soloing together.

Ah, yes. Soloing together. It seemed such a revolutionary concept at the time. I remember Gordon, in what was possibly his last-ever post for his much-missed We Fly Spitfires blog, describing with bemusement his experience of completing events alongside another player in Guild Wars 2.

He was concerned that they never spoke but of course they had no need to. Modern MMOs don't require you to talk to each other even if you do choose to group. As Sandrian says, "Most of the chatter in random dungeons... is virtually non-existant. People don’t really talk and if they do it’s often only a “hello” or “goodbye”.

These days, even content that is undeniably not soloable is still played solo. I spent much of yesterday in World vs World. Sometimes I ran alongside the zerg, outside the squad. Sometimes I was squadded. It made little difference either way.

Other times I stood around in keeps and camps, scouting, guarding, skirmishing. I herded yaks and fired cannons. I spent a glorious couple of hours helping in a surreal attempt to upgrade Dreadfall Bay by filling North West Camp with omegas. The whole time I was with people, but on my own; talking, but talking in map or team chat - to people standing not ten yards away.

In this 21st Century life, the boundaries between public and private, social and solipsistic are blurred if not broken.  Families, friends and co-workers sit in the same rooms and communicate by text or email or Twitter and Facebook. Watching television with friends means lying in your bedroom alone, tweeting smart remarks to your followers.

Gaming used to set cultural leads although lately the trends have been all the other way. "Gamer" is fast becoming shorthand for "conservative". Perhaps that's why the murmurings about the value and purity of group play have grown a little louder of late.

Nascent conservatism aside, it seems unlikely the wheel will turn full circle. The new asymetric social systems we all use and most of us enjoy are too convenient to give up. It seems peculiar to think of the early noughties as "a simpler time" but perhaps they were. Maybe we did all have more time then and more patience.

Or more likely we had less choice. If we'd been able to click a button back then to get a group how many of us would still have stood by the bank spamming "Rogue lfg" hour after hour? When Pantheon (and that other would-be hardcore, old school title I won't name, for fear of calling up one of its hyper-vigilant developers like He Who Must Not Be Named) finally arrives, will there be a deluge of defections from solo-friendly games like WoW and GW2?

I doubt it. We don't do a lot of things in the same, semi-formal group-friendly way we once did and not just in our gaming. The generations following on will see both socializing and friendship in a different way, not just to their parents and grandparents, but to every generation going back to the caves.

What it means to be human is changing. In this way, perhaps MMORPGs simply got there first.

Head Full Of Steam : City of Steam

I sometimes refer, rather glibly, to "my top five favorite MMOs of all time", which makes it sound as though I keep a list. I don't. I tend to slot things in and out on a whim as the occasion arises, as my mood changes or, as is most often the case, as I remember some game I'd entirely forgotten and succumb to a surge of nostalgic affection.

One such title is City of Steam. I have a lot of history with that unlucky and mostly unloved MMO. There are more than fifty posts tagged for the game here on Inventory Full, starting with my thoughts about the pre-alpha Sneak Peak back in March 2012 and ending with a brief mention in May of this year, when I said  "One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential".

I also wrote "The original vision for the game was... a real labor of love". What I neglected to mention then, or probably ever, was that the "original vision" was also a published pen and paper roleplaying game.

I vaguely knew it existed. Or once had. The subject came up occasionally on the forums but that provenance was never really pushed as heavily as it might have been. Instead, Nexus seemed to  emerge, fully formed, out of the void, something that was  - and still is - quite common with MMOs.

Nevertheless, it's clear from early promo trailers like Room for Rent that someone knew a backstory we didn't. I felt much the same about WildStar. It's a good way to create interest in an otherwise unfamiliar property.

On a few occasions I've commented that City of Steam was at its very best in its earliest incarnations. It's commonplace to claim that MMOs are better in beta. That's not always objectively true - there are several subjective factors - exclusivity, novelty, camaraderie - that influence opinion - but also it is an indisputable fact that games do often change radically in development.

City of Steam changed many times. The Sneak Peak was perhaps the purest, most distilled version of creator David Lindsay's original vision, while some of the Alphas may have been the most immersive. I called the first Alpha "a disturbingly compulsive experience".

The game changed a lot in beta and in it's various Live iterations, first drifting and then sprinting away from its original conception. The final version, City of Steam: Arcadia, was arguably a better game but it was also as a neon-lit carnival, almost a parody of the dark, brooding, anxiety-inducing retro-future I'd fallen in love with five years before.

City of Steam shuttered in early 2016. There were vague hints that it might not be the end for the concept but Mechanist Games moved on to a new project, Heroes of Skyrealm.

HoS was a mobile game. I've played it. It was quite good, in its way. It almost felt as if it was part of the same world as City of Steam, but much shinier and more upbeat. Yesterday, for arcane reasons I won't go into, I thought of it and went to check the website to see how it was doing.

It's dead. But I didn't know that until this morning.

Heroes of Skyrealm launched in the Spring of 2017 and closed in June 2018, just over a year later. I only learned that five minutes ago as I was fact-checking for this post. The website is still there, frozen in time at the moment before Open Beta began in February last year. The links still go to the Google Play and Apple Store but the game is no longer there. I found the sunset announcement on Facebook.

The reason I didn't discover the sad news of the demise of Heroes of Skyrealm yesterday is that as I was following links back to Mechanist Games to see what they were up to I landed on the "About" page, where I read this:

"City of Steam: Arkadia... is based on The New Epoch, a series of table-top game books written by David Lindsay, co-founder of Mechanist Games" 

So I googled "The New Epoch" and found this. Minutes later I was the happy owner of Watermarked PDFs of both The Character Codex and The Adventure Codex for what is to all intents and purposes the roleplaying game edition of City of Steam.

I've written before about how reassuring and comforting it is to have a solid, physical representation of a virtual world. Novels, gamebooks, comics, even soft toys all help shore up confidence against the inevitable day when the last server goes offline.

Best of all, though, is a full set of roleplaying rules that let you feel that you could re-create the entire gameworld on your kitchen table. If you wanted to. You never will, of course, but you could, and that's what counts.

A PDF isn't quite as good as a printed book but it's a darn sight better than nothing. And these PDFs are stylishly designed and lavishly - gorgeously - illustrated in full color.

I haven't had time to read much in depth as yet. I need to transfer the files onto a device I can hold in my hand before I get stuck in to the detail.

Even so, at a skim, I can already tell just how fascinating a read it's going to be. It's not just the pre-cursor to the game I loved - it is that game. Some of the illustrations in the book are even the very same ones that were used in the early promotional videos.

One of my few gaming regrets is that I never finished the storyline in City of Steam or saw all the zones. I can't change that but now I have another chance to dig deeper into the lore and history that was always evident but ever elusive in the game itself.

And, I guess, one day I might even get to tell some stories of my own.

Walking My Dog Named Cat : Bless Online

When I learned that Bless Online has a different starting area and storyline for each of its seven races I was quite excited. I found the storyline for the first race I tried, the diminutive and (optionally) furry Mascu, engaging and entertaining. The prospect of another half-dozen narratives of that quality was enticing.

When my Mascu ranger ran into a minor roadblock in the main storyline somewhere in the mid-teens, rather than grind out a level or two on Monster Books and side quests to get past it, I decided to roll another character and see what their starting area and story was like. Of course, it doesn't take much to persuade me to roll an alt.

Leather hot pants and thigh boots. I know! it's a classic, right?

Heading back into character creation, I was reminded of something I'd skipped over the first time around. I didn't think to mention it in the post I wrote about making a character but six of Bless's seven classes are faction-locked. More significantly, since this is a faction-based PvP game, you can only play one faction per server.

By sheer chance my race of first preference , Mascu, is the only one shared by both factions. I didn't know that when I chose it. I also knew nothing about the factions so I picked Hieron pretty much at random. From a few things I've read since, apparently Union is the casual-preferred faction, partly due to snazzier mount options and partly because of the lore.

If I'd wanted to try one of the Union races I could have started over on a new server (there are four, two each on EU and NA, down from fifteen at launch according to the wiki, which might be some kind of record in just a couple of months... ) but I also wanted to find out if bank space was shared so I chose what I thought was a catlike race from the Hieron options in front of me.

Young wolf, run free.

Making the character was an absorbing experience. I could spend a long time playing around with Bless's options and sliders. Eventually I dragged myself away from the controls, settled on a look, gave my new cat-girl a cat-person name I often use when playing cat-people and logged in.

Imagine my surprise to discover I was a wolf. You'd think I might have noticed, not least because the freakin' race is called the Lupus, but no. This is what happens when you don't do your research. Or pay attention.

Just for information, there is a cat-person race. It's on the Union side and it's called the Pantera. These aren't hard codes to crack. The other four racial options are two flavors of human (Habichts and Armistad) and two sorts of elf (Sylvan and Aqua). I plan on trying them all.

Spooky red glow. It's a bad thing.

The Lupus starting area is delightful if entirely unoriginal. It reminded me of both the Priden starting area in Allods Online and the Tauren newbie zone in World of Warcraft. Lots of totem poles, wooden lodges and forest trails. Everyone's drawing from the same real-world well but it's always a refreshing draught.

The Lupus storyline isn't as unusual as the Mascu's but it's a decent example of the tribal rite-of-passage that goes wrong trope. I quickly found myself drawn in to the narrative, which was interesting enough that I wanted to explore all the conversational options to find out more of the back-story.

Bless has a lot of conversational options. Not the kind where you get to choose from a snarky, noble or neutral response for your character (I hate those) but the sort where you can interrogate NPCs at some length to reveal more about the gameworld's biography, history or lore. It also has a lot of good quality cut-scenes, something I should have mentioned in my First Impressions posts.

Smoke gets in your eyes. And your fur.

Wherever the quests are voiced, the additional text options also seem to have been fully translated from the original Korean. Those are definitely worth reading. I read all the quest text anyway, regardless of the quality of the English, but the well-translated ones are good enough that it makes me wish they'd had the time, money or inclination to buff up the rest as well.

So far, so good, then. I've played two races and very much enjoyed both starting experiences. There is a problem, though. They're too short.

I was hoping the individual racial storylines would take me all the way to Level 30, which is when both factions come together to compete over the same quest content. Sadly, that's not how it works.

Look at the way she stands on the balls of her toes. And those gigantic hands. Best werewolf ever.

The Mascu and Lupus storylines merge much sooner than that, around level five, at the point where you arive in the factional capital city of Hieron. I knew it was going to happen even before I got there. It was a bit of a give-away when the same NPC that my Mascu ranger sidekicks for turned up to take my wolf-girl under his wing in the Lupus starting story.

The upshot is that there's nowhere near as much unique questing and storyline content in Bless as I'd hoped. It was a bit much to expect, thinking about it. On the positive side, however, there are still six short stories of some quality to enjoy and two full-length storylines, assuming, as must be the case, that the Union story is entirely different to the Hieron throughout.

No airship trip for me. All the way on the back of a flying lizard. Hmm... that reminds me of something...

That does mean playing two elves to see them all but you can't have everything. It's also more achievable. I don't imagine I would ever had worked my way through seven sets of thirty levels, no matter how good the stories might have been - and I'm not saying they're that good. Just decent.

And that shared bank? There isn't one. But there is a shared wallet. My wolf-girl was able to dip into my Mascu's savings to buy herself a full set of armor at level one, rendering any combat in the starting instance trivial. Also any quest rewards. I'm not sure they've entirely thought this through...

The Rhythm Method

Telwyn reminds me that the theme of this Blaugust week is "Staying Motivated". I'd almost forgotten we had themes because, with less than a week left to go, I am, if anything, over-motivated by the imminence of the end.

Belghast took an enormous amount of care this year to avoid placing any kind of expectation on anyone who chose to participate. He commented that it was his fear that in the past "Blaugust wound up killing more blogs than it wound up helping" as bloggers found themselves overwhelmed by the immensity of the task they'd taken on.

No-one needs to feel that they have to post every single day. Bel created a whole range of Awards to make that point abundantly clear:

• Newbie Blogger Award – You did it, you created a new blog and by god we are going to sing your praises for doing it!
• Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2018.
• Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2018, go you!
• Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2018, you are a badass!
• Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted every single day during the Month of August 2018 and deserve accolades.

Now, awards definitely motivate people. There are lots of blogs I read that proudly display all kinds of icons and banners and flags that have been handed out during various events over the past few years. I've read some lovely posts where bloggers have been surprised, delighted and grateful to have won an award. Maybe if you're a post or two shy of one of those targets, just the thought of a shiny would be motivation enough to get you back to tapping those keys

I'm not personally all that interested in winning awards but I do find myself highly motivated by hitting targets. And I do like to do what I say I'm going to do. If I say I'm going to post every day in August I am darn well going to post every day in August, whether I enjoy it or not! I'm stubborn that way.

That's not really a good thing. What's more, it goes entirely against the advice I would give (and have given) to other people. I would always say that when it comes to something you do in your own time, for your own amusement, you should feel both able and willing to stop as soon as you find you're not enjoying it.

Which I would, if I wasn't. That's the thing. It's entirely possible to enjoy something while not enjoying it. I look forward to coming home from work and blogging at exactly the same time I as I wish hadn't committed myself to doing just that.

Stop and smell the lupins.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Blaugust and I'm very pleased with myself for having posted every day and yet I'm counting the days until it's over because I can't wait to have my workday evenings back. I can absolutely understand why some people post every day in August and then don't post anything else until Christmas.

For me it won't be that extreme. I'll go back to my normal routine of posting each day that I don't have to work, three or four times a week. With luck, I'll remember it is at least possible to get a quick post out on a weekday evening so my frequency might be a little higher for a while, but it won't last.

The thing to remember - the most important thing - is that blogging has a rhythm and that rhythm is different for every blogger. If you sign up to a set of external standards, as with Blaugust, it's fine to play along while it's working for you, but it's just as fine to stop and swap them for standards of your own.

As Wilhelm says in his excellent post about Editorial Policy, "what you do on your blog just has to please you". That applies to frequency just as much as it does to whether you italicize World of Warcraft or shun the Oxford comma.

If you want or need to take a break after Blaugust then take one. If you feel you're just hitting your stride then carry on! There's no correct cadence or set schedule. Post when posting feels right for you.

And if you give yourself permission to post only when you want to post, perhaps you'll even find yourself wanting to post more often. It's not a job, it's a hobby. Enjoy it.

Long Summer Days : EQ2

Just a short note to give any EQ2 players a heads-up that the excellent and essential Days of Summer event is back. Since I've been neglecting EQ2 in favor of Bless, I would have missed it myself, had it not been for a line in Kaozz's recent post.

EQTraders had already flagged the event when it began on August 21st - Naimi Denmother makes a point of drawing our attention to anything with even the most tangential connection to tradeskills and Days of Summer comes with a lot of items for decorating houses - but somehow I missed it. She has a page with all the details we know so far.

Fortunately, although the event began as a limited-time affair last year, it proved so popular it now stays in game as a permanent fixture. Yun Zi spends his entire life standing around in Sundered Frontier, making inane small-talk and handing out amazingly good items no casual player can afford to ignore.

He's acquired a tiny companion called Pas Yu this year, a panda of extremely restricted stature, who acts as his bag holder. I nearly missed him after I'd finished the first quest. He has all the sweet loot and it is sweet indeed.

To do the quests you need to have at least one max level character and the gear you get is Level 110 (making a lot of it upgrades for me even after the expansion has been out for almost a year). The housing items work for any level and some of the upgrades are suitable for level 100 and up. Once you complete the quest on a single character, any character on the account can shop at Yun Zi's for the low price of no money at all.

Like last year, there will be eight weeks of quests. The new quest comes with the weekly patch/server restart on Tuesdays. You have to have completed all of last year's quests before you can do this year's but if you're just getting started you can do both sets.

Using a guide, like the one on EQ2Traders or the wiki, each quest only takes a few minutes, especially if you use the wonderful and essential Fast Travel option from the Map window. If you're an All Access member you get that for free (and it's worth the monthly sub on its own in my opinion) but since you also have to be a Member to do the quests in the first place that's not a problem.

I raced around Antonica last night on the first of this year's quests and it was really good fun and very nostalgic. I found I could remember the exact location of every stop without having to check. I've spent so many hours in Antonica I know it as well as I know the countryside around my own home.

I was also lucky enough to arrive there at gametime sunset. Antonica has some absolutely spectacular skies at dawn and dusk. The graphics in the older part of the game are showing their age but the skyboxes are still as breathtaking as ever.

Like last year, Days of Summer is going to prep casual players for the Autumn expansion, although if DBG follow last year's model the expansion itself will start with free gear that's even better. This kind of thing is why I rate the current DBG team so highly. I've never felt so well looked after as a casual player. Long may it continue.

It's The Beginning Of A New World

This week's big talking point in MMOland has to be the unheralded info-drop on Amazon's New World. Until now we knew almost nothing about this title, other than its setting, an alternate, magical version of the 17th Century.

Massively OP seem a little confused over the timing of the reveal but no-one's questioning the authenticity. Interestingly, the last time any significant information emerged about New World it was also described as "possibly leaked", making me wonder whether there's anything truly accidental about any of this.

The M:OP piece is a tad misleading. I'd recommend reading the full article at TechAdvisor, which gives a good deal more detail and some important context. For example, the "full loot" PvP alluded to in Massively's bullet point list, is heavily qualified in the article itself, which says

"...currently when you die you drop all of your gear which can then be looted by other players"

That "currently" is crucial. This is a game in pre-alpha. Unless Amazon come out and state that full loot is a core game feature, I'd bet it won't make it out of beta. If it even gets that far.

That said, there's no glossing over the bald facts: New World is a PvP game.

 Or is it? Even the blatant

PvP seems to be at the very focal heart of the game

is more nuanced than it first appears. "Seems to be" is either a bet-hedger or an admission there's a lack of hard information. And what's with that "very focal heart"? Does that mean PvP is everywhere or concentrated somewhere in the center? I can see why Bree thought this might be a draft text.

The supposed emphasis on what sounds almost like forced socialization is also heavily tempered in the full text of the TA piece. While it does indeed say that

 "The game puts a very heavy focus on social features and everything that comes along with player interaction"

it goes on to clarify that

"Forming guilds to take on greater challenges and build your empire... will be a good idea if you want to survive".

That's really not so different from any other MMO, is it? Greater challenges almost always require guilds. We tend to call it "raiding" in PvE or "guild vs guild" in PvP. You're hardly going to be building an empire on your own, are you? I wouldn't read that as meaning there's no place for solo or small group play at all.

The article goes on to explain how empire-building might work in practice: 

You can capture land and build upon it, creating outposts and bases for your guild to operate from which can house more advanced crafting stations giving you access to better gear. Your territory can expand over time... You will be able to tax players that wish to operate or build within your territory, which allows their structures to be under your protection for a price.

So far, so familiar, but the crucial part, which I've pulled out for emphasis, is this:

"...territory control ... will be a large part of the 'end game'."

Taken in context, this suggests to me that New World's end game is very similar in concept to Ashes of Creation's. A never-ending tussle between guilds and allainces to rule the roost and rook the peasants.

As a prospective peasant in both games I strongly expect to be able to wander around largely oblivious to the machinations of my rulers. I will be beneath their notice and they will be above mine.

The writer of the piece, Sean Bradley, did at least get to play the current demonstration build, so his assessment that it feels

"...like a survival game in the vein of Rust, Conan Exiles or Ark"

 can probably be taken at face value. That's not appealing to me and neither is the choice of action combat rather than tab targeting and hotbars, although I will concede that it was inevitable. No-one but MMO nerds want WoW-style combat these days and Amazon wants to cast its net a lot wider than the pre-existing niche audience that, bizarrely, WoW now represents.

And yet, even here there's a hint of grey in the black and white. The current build allows you to lock to a target using Tab. Sean also describes it as "very fluid and responsive" and "not too fast or slow", which is encouraging for a pre-alpha.

Like Telwyn, I found a lot of the Massively:OP summary off-putting. I was inclined to cross New World off my wishlist completely. Having read the full article at TechAdviser, however, my interest has been tentatively re-ignited. It's not a long read but there's a lot in there, more than I've singled out for attention here. I recommend anyone even vaguley interested in New World to read the whole thing.

Finally, and most importantly, this is a game in closed pre-alpha. A lot can change. A lot will change. There's a "sign up" for alpha available on the website that consists merely of registering your interest on your Amazon account. It takes five seconds. I've done that.

It still doesn't look like my kind of game but who knows?

Now That's What I Call A Patch Message Vol 1

Hang on a minute... left ankle? Are we talking Long Johns here?



Source 

Publish And Be Damned : Ashes of Creation

There are precious few AAA Western MMORPGs in development right now. Yesterday there was news on two of them. It wasn't encouraging.

Intrepid Studios, developers of Ashes of Creation, whose Kickstarter I backed, announced a publishing deal for Europe. The game will be published by My.com, who are owned by Mail.ru and currently operate Allods, Skyforge and Revelation Online among others.

The reaction to this has been almost universally hostile. My.com has a very poor reputation with players, it seems, and everyone is wary of the Russians. I wasn't perturbed at first, my own initial reaction being more along the lines of "that's handy - I already have a My.com account so I won't have to make a new one".

The hoo-hah mostly seems to be focused on My.com's rep for encouraging or even enforcing pay-to-win. The ancient incense scandal that blighted Allods' launch seven years ago has not been forgotten or forgiven.

As I recall, that was fixed fairly swiftly but no-one seems to remember that part. I doubt anyone commenting on it has played the game since, either, which is a pity. Allods is still running and has received numerous updates over the years. It's a very good MMORPG. Revelation Online seemed fine when I played it briefly, too. Skyforge I've not tried.

My own equanimity notwithstanding, feelings have been running high and Steven Sharif of Intrepid felt moved to quell the rebellion with an assurance that P2W doesn't feature in AoC's future:

 “I would like everyone in our community to be aware. Intrepid will maintain 100% creative control over Ashes and our partners My.com and Mail.ru shares our vision for Ashes...This means our stance on p2w for the game".️ 

All well and good. Unfortunately he goes on to say

"This partnership allows us as a Studios to focus on the development of the game and allows us to feel comfortable with the level of service that we know my.com and Mail.ru can provide". 

Yes, and, as they say, monkeys might fly out of my butt. All the EU F2P publishers have appalling customer service. Why would you have anything else when you have "customers" who didn't choose you in the first place, have no option to take their custom elsewhere and don't pay you any money?

For me, this is a non-issue so long as the game isn't region locked. I have always preferred to play on U.S. servers if allowed. I feel more comfortable in the culture there and my ping from the U.K. to the U.S. is often as good as or even better than my ping to servers based in the E.U.

The current AoC wiki states that "Regional IP blocks are not currently planned", which sounds reassuring - until you check the provenance of that highly conditional statement. It comes from a developer Q&A from July 2017, in which the reason why IP blocks aren't being planned is also explained. It's because IP blocks usually derive from publishing deals and Intrepid are planning to self-publish.

As a U.K. resident I also have to wonder what effect the Brexit deal (or lack thereof) might have. I can't imagine continued, smooth operation of video games is even on anyone's radar right now, what with the prospect of international flights being grounded, supermarkets running out of food and hospitals out of drugs. I should probably stockpile a few offline rpgs. And maybe a portable generator...

Anyway, it's all a long way in the future. I can't see Ashes of Creation launching before 2020 at the earliest. I'm signed up for beta, which I guess we might get to next year. I'll deal with it when the time comes.

And that ran so long I think I'll split this post in two. I'll get to Amazon's New World tomorrow. (This is what Blaugust does to you. I'm already wishing I'd split the Bless First Impressions posts into four chapters instead of just two.)